TV Presenting - the job anybody can do and nobody can do

I haven't been watching Channel 4's coverage of the world athletics championship but nonetheless the news of the tribulations of lead presenter Ortis Deeley reached me via various waspish comments in the newspapers. You can get an idea of how at sea he was in this item in the Guardian. Now he's been demoted mid-games.

I tend to believe that in 99% of situations where the presenter has egg on his face it's not his fault. He's just the poor bloke out front trying to put a brave face on it while unseen others grapple with the logistics. Having said that it wouldn't have been asking too much of him to expect him to learn the names of the commentators he was handing over to so that he didn't get them wrong twice.

But the person who should be in the dock here is not Deeley, who is probably only guilty of a little too much ambition and not quite enough homework. The guilty party is whichever, presumably highly-paid, person at Channel 4 decided: a) that anchoring a major live sports presentation like this could be done by a novice rather than the most battle-hardened professional on your books; b) that the novice should be this graduate of Saturday morning television.

Only in television is the person who fronts the business likely to have been chosen by somebody who has never personally fronted the business, doesn't know what's involved in fronting the business and intends to keep their head firmly below the parapet when their choice of person to front the business is proved to have been so wrong.

P.S. I was talking to a senior person in a large company recently and congratulating her on the quality of her young intern, who seemed to be the last word in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed efficiency. She rolled her eyes and said "She doesn't read a book. No hinterland."

John Rawling is a pretty well-known commentator and I'd like to feel that anyone who ended up anchoring a sports show might have heard of him. If, that is, they had a hinterland.

A great music book about the days when the road was the road

This weekend I finished The Chitlin' Circuit: and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll by Preston Lauterbach, which is one of the best music books I've read in years. Chitlins are pig intestines which, when fried, were a popular delicacy among African Americans. Hence the Chitlin' Circuit was the name given to the network of dancehalls, night clubs and music joints flourishing below the Mason Dixon Line in the days before television and mass entertainment.

Lauterbach's book is essentially the story of Denver Ferguson and Don Robey, the promoters who realised that every community down south had a "dark town" and every dark town had a "stroll", a parade of black-owned barbers, beer joints, undertakers and money lenders. Where there was a stroll there was invariably a market for rambunctious musical entertainment.

Thus they despatched hundreds of entertainers on tours of one-nighters throughout the south in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Advance men went out in front, making sure that the musicians' record was on the jukebox. Recorded music was about immortality and profile, not about money. This was a live business and it ran as perfectly in sync with human self-interest as eBay does today.

If the performers were lucky there were black hotels that might accommodate them. More likely they'd be staying in boarding houses or sleeping on buses, doing their best to keep their stage clothes clean, trying to make sure they got paid at the end of the night and avoiding the attentions of razor-toting members of the audience who suspected the saxophone player of looking at their girl.

In the 30s it was all about the big bands. Walter Barnes and his Royal Creolians were one of the biggest attractions of that era. They were killed along with 290 dancers in a 1940 fire in a dancehall at Natchez, Mississippi. Many of these venues were known as "toilets", not because of the sanitary conditions, but because there was just one way in and one way out.

It's full of examples of ingenuity in pursuit of green: from the "policy" rackets that drove the neighbourhood economies to the promoters who put on "sissie nights" to cater for the transvestite market; from James Brown's first group whistling the instrumental passages because they couldn't afford gear to the early 78s which were literally baked like biscuits. Nobody in this book talks of creativity. They talk about making a living.

By the 40s a wartime shortage of buses meant the bands got smaller after the style of Louis Jordan's Tympany Five. It became more about rocking than swinging. When Elvis Presley finally came along, chitlin circuit heroes like Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris wondered what the fuss was about. They'd been making that exact same sound for five years.

I suspect some canny publisher suggested the author put that bit about rock'n'roll in the title. There's a tendency to undervalue any version of popular music that doesn't culminate in a big white millionaire. It's a shame we have to see it like that. Even if this journey had led nowhere in particular it would still have been a hell of a ride.

Another tiny detail from Nick Lowe's new record

The Nick Lowe album is gentle, which is not the same as being quiet. There are plenty of quiet records at the moment which are actually quite tense to listen to. Most of "The Old Magic" is performed with a band but it's put over so gently that you pick up nuances lost in 99% of pop records.

There's a lovely bit at the end of House For Sale. This is sung from the point of view of a bloke trying to get rid of the house where love "once did reside". Like all vendors he wishes to reassure potential purchasers that while its material condition may be shabby there's nothing that can't be improved.

In fact, he sings, "with time, care, cash, peace, love and understanding it can be as good as new". The unusual word in that list is "cash", which he seems to acknowledge in the half-beat's pause before singing it. When the word "cash" turns up in pop music it tends to be used aggressively. It's rhymed with flash and trash. To hear it suffused with the same comforting glow it creates in the householder who's got some is a delight. Particularly in times like these.

Forget Ab Fab. This is what the 60s really looked like

This picture of the HMV Shop in Oxford Street has been doing the rounds again today. Judging by the LP covers displayed at the back it appears to have been taken at Christmas 1965. The Beatles Rubber Soul has just come out and the shop is more than usually full.

The interesting thing is this is at the midway point of the Swinging 60s. This has been the year of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and James Brown's Papa's Got A Brand New Bag. If you were to ask a film director to re-stage this scene he'd look at the date and suddenly it would be all paisley shirts, bell bottoms and op-art frocks which as you can see here was not the case.

This picture is a rare opportunity to examine the reality of the 60s rather than the version of it that's been propagated by Austin Powers films. The men have all got neatly-trimmed short hair and are wearing shirts and ties. There's a woman in a head scarf. The assistant behind the counter is in a nylon overall. The till has just run up 32 shillings, which was probably the price of one of those copies of the Beach Boys' Little Deuce Coupe stacked at the top above the listening booths.

There's nothing as improving as a dead end job

After we'd finished recording a podcast with David Ford the other day Fraser said "that's three of us who've been road sweepers". I did two years as a road sweeper in north London during college vacations in the seventies before graduating to the dustbins. Sweeping was boring but it was educational, like doing the Knowledge. Working on the bins was hard, lucrative and, believe it or not, fun. That's another blog entirely.

I was reminded of this experience when reading Alice Thomson's column in The Times today where she says "the professional middle classes used to mix widely in pubs, factories and communities. Now they are ghettoised" and goes on to argue that they don't need more holiday jobs helping out in law offices. There seems to be some truth in that. My own kids have done holiday jobs but they haven't done anything like the bins or the Christmas post, which were staples for grammar school boys like me back in the day.

The decline of manufacturing, the march of automation and the need for every job to require some training means that it's no longer possible for a dozy 18-year-old to find useful employment the way that we did. Everybody of my age has a vivid memory of what it was like to work in a factory or to perform some mundane, repetitive task, often in the company of people who didn't make any allowance for the fact that you were young and foolish. It was more educational than the education it was designed to subsidise.

Jerry Leiber - songwriting's great pretender

Jerry Leiber's death was announced today. A Jewish kid from Baltimore whose first language was Yiddish, he wrote the words for more classic rhythm and blues tunes than anyone else. He's best known for Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock, which is a pity because neither of them is a particularly interesting song. Far better are the gems he and Mike Stoller wrote and produced for The Coasters: three-minute dramas like Searchin', Smokey Joe's Cafe and Young Blood, each one a dazzling mixture of Saturday morning funnies, black street slang and social comment wrapped around infallible hooks and brilliant playing.

Leiber's ear for the nuances of African-American language was uncanny, as was his nerve in putting himself into situations that he may not have experienced at first hand. In Down Home Girl the protagonist, a sharp car worker from Detroit, going out with a girl from the backwoods of the Carolinas, sings "every time I kiss you, girl, you taste like pork and beans".

The Sistine Chapel of this purple patch was Shopping For Clothes, which they wrote under the name "Elmo Glick", exactly what a black Jewish songwriter would be called. Here a would-be dandy goes into a department store, picks out the clothes that will make him the envy of the guys at the ballroom on Saturday night and then finds that his credit is refused. As somebody pointed out to me today on Twitter, the fade-out "I got a good job sweeping up every day" says more about civil rights than any amount of Blowing In The Wind.

When I was growing up those Coasters songs were merely musical comedy in the background. It was only in my twenties, via such magazines as Cream and Let It Rock, and the writings of Charlie Gillett and Richard Williams, that I came to appreciate the genius of the Coasters and Leiber and Stoller and realised that fifties r&b was not just insanely catchy and clever. It was also grown up, subtle and serious in ways we are only just now beginning to appreciate. In fact it's a lot cleverer than the records that think they're clever.

Is this what they mean by playing in the big leagues?

When our son used to play rugby as a teenager there was always a nervous moment when the opposition came running out. You'd look at them and be immediately struck by how much bigger they appeared than our boys. Surely they had to be from another age group. Of course they weren't. This was simply an illusion fostered by the fact that you didn't notice how fast your own were growing.

I was struck by something similar last night watching Tottenham swat Hearts aside by five goals to nil. Obviously there was a gulf in class which is an inevitable result of the gulf in money and prestige. But what was surprising is that there was such a gulf in physique. Even Tottenham's smaller players appeared barrel chested. Next to them Hearts looked like a bunch of under-nourished schoolboys.

He might have been a spy but he didn't patronise

Best moment from an excellent episode of the always interesting The Reunion on Radio Four was an anecdote about the spy and art historian Anthony Blunt. Called upon to explain Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I to a group of nine-year-olds in the National Gallery he surveyed the children sitting on the floor and began thus:

"If I could just remind you of the historical background to this picture....."

Is anybody writing better love songs than Nick Lowe?

The upcoming Nick Lowe album The Old Magic" starts with a song called "Stoplight Roses". I'd never heard that particular expression before but I immediately knew what he was singing about. Many years ago a good friend who was out there in the dating game said to me, "Better no flowers than garage flowers". She said it feelingly. I have since passed on this advice to young men of my acquaintance.

The last few Nick Lowe albums are like a series of slim novels which explore the perfidious inclinations of men. I think they're some of the best pop records ever made. They're certainly some of the most affecting explorations of regret since Frank Sinatra's "lonely" albums of the 1950s. The men in Nick Lowe's songs reach for romantic gestures when cornered but generally underestimate how rigorously those gestures might be interpreted.

The key line in "Stoplight Roses" is especially chilling. "You've broken something this time," he sings, "stoplight roses can't mend".

My unique take on the London riots

The London riots may not have been the biggest outbreak of disobedience and larceny in the capital's history - as a quick flick through Peter Akroyd's London: The Biography demonstrates - but they are already the most commented on.

As someone who from time to time "gives out" about issues of the day who has been unavoidably detained in a hammock in Brittany while it's all been going on, I feel I should make it clear that, other than sending my sympathies to anyone who's been directly affected, I have nothing to say.

I have no prescriptions to offer, no advice to give the government or the police and no bright ideas for instantly improving people's behaviour. I realise this may come as a disappointment to some of my regular readers but there it is.

I've had it with the "pudding first" school of TV documentary

Started The First World War From Above on the iPlayer. After five minutes I turned it off. It seemed to have all the things that drive me mad about today's factual programmes:

* A script machine assembled from a Scrabble set of clichés: "bird's eye view", "like a lunar landscape", "today's state of the art technology", "those brave pilots", "from the intimate to the truly epic" and so on;
* More shots of the noble presenter, Fergal Keane, looking at the things which are supposed to be interesting than of the things themselves;
* Swelling music to reassure us that the programme will be emotional as well as informative;
* The insistence that the programme will "uncover one of World War One's secrets"' - a "secret" being anything that's not been in this time-slot before
* A three-minute opening section desperate to shoehorn in a taster of everything that's coming up in the next hour, up to and including "the extraordinary encounter at the end of my journey when I meet the daughter of the airship pilot of ninety years ago" and the obligatory shot of somebody crying when they see some film of their father.

There's nothing wrong with making factual programmes entertaining but techniques like these seem to be rooted in a growing belief that we won't eat our greens unless we're first assured that there will be pudding. After a while we lose our appetite.

Every joke has its day

Back in 1978 we were on holiday in Los Angeles. We stayed at the Sunset Marquis. This was the rock and roll hotel at the time. Bruce Springsteen had recently checked out. Santana were there, as were Hall & Oates.

It was summer and there was a small hot tub in the grounds which had room for about half a dozen people. We were lounging in there one day when we were joined by a hippyish chap and an elderly French gentleman. Listening to their conversation it dawned on me that the latter was Stéphane Grappelli, the violinist who played with Django Reinhardt in the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The former was the American mandolinist David Grisman. This is impressive but not as impressive as a member of the Hot Club.

This week I happened to relate this story to Mark Ellen. He cracked the joke that has been waiting to be cracked for almost 35 years.

"Ah yes," he said. "The Hot Tub de France."

Twitter leaves the media standing

Yesterday morning Broadcasting House on Radio 4 carried an item about the death of Amy Winehouse. The reporter went to Camden Square and mused into his microphone about why people were standing around. He then recorded interviews with them. It seems likely that even more people will subsequently come to stand around because at last something was happening. People were getting interviewed about why they were standing around.

The media may well have to get used to just standing around looking at people standing around because this weekend's events have seen them not so much breaking stories as puffing along in their wake. The first hint of the events in Oslo appeared in my Twitter timeline in the middle of Friday afternoon. I searched on "Oslo" and immediately my screen looked like the Dow Jones index at the height of a crash, with tens of thousands of tweets in different languages scrolling past at an unreadable speed. I switched on Five Live, which is the BBC's news and sport station, to hear Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode reviewing films. I found myself on an RTE site where they were just running the feed from Norwegian TV.

Similarly the following afternoon I was watching rugby on TV with the iPad on my lap when a tweet appeared from a source who you'd expect to be well informed, asking "Is this Winehouse story true?". I immediately searched on "Winehouse" and discovered what the story was. This can't have been more than half an hour after the ambulance had arrived at her home. An hour later it was confirmed.

Obviously mainstream broadcasters and newspapers can't publish on the basis of unsubstantiated tweets but the pressure to do so is going to become harder and harder to resist. And this at a time when there is talk of them being brought into line. It'll be funny if the press are restrained from intruding into private lives while at the same time a medium ideally suited to the spreading of unsubstantiated gossip become's the nation's favourite toy.

Do people think like they tweet or tweet like they think?

Years ago Andrew Harrison told me the proper etiquette for communicating with people on eBay. When you give feedback, he advised, you've got to exaggerate. A thank-you isn't enough, he said. It has to be accompanied by the word "brilliant" and a thicket of exclamation marks. He was right.

That was years before Twitter. When you've only got 140 characters to work with adjectives tend to take the place of thoughts. This produces a language in which the world is divided into people who are either "lovely" or "bad" and every experience is either "amazing" or "crap". There's no way of dealing with the average or of discriminating between monstrous events and everyday disappointments.

I wondered yesterday whether this was a case of language changing the way people thought or language changing to reflect the way they already thought. I was still wondering when the first news came in of the events in Oslo. Radio was running its usual programming and so I searched "Oslo" on Twitter. I'd never done that before in the moments after such a terrible event. Suddenly my screen was alive with thousands of messages in many different languages. Some were close to the event - there was a Word reader who lived ten minutes away - others were trying to find out about loved ones; most were, like me, just turning up to gawk, like people slowing down when passing the scene of an accident.

Some people seemed to be trying to set down their feelings before they'd decided what their feelings were. Did the person who wrote "Oslo bombed. Shitty day" really feel that the events of Friday were a bit like standing in a puddle or missing a few buses? Did the person tapping "this is so surreal" know what surreal meant and did they really find the idea of a bomb in a major European city in 2011 "hard to believe"? Maybe they did.

I'm sure all these messages were motivated by nothing but simple compassion. I suppose a lot of the people doing the messaging were very young. Surely that's the case with the one who wrote "peeps in Norway. Hope you're OK." I only hope they don't forget about it as quickly as they tweeted about it.

There's nothing as funny as an old Grazia cover line

One of the curses of the internet is that old issues of gossip magazines stick around to haunt their editors. These are just a few Grazia cover stories I found last night.

"Victoria - leading separate life from David" (December 2007)

Think they've just had a baby.

"Brangelina - it's over - Brad banned from bedroom" (March 2009)

Seem to be going strong three years later.

"Jennifer to adopt a baby boy called Alex!" (April 2008)

Didn't.

"Jen and Brad - back together?" (May 2009)

No.

"Katie flips! Is new marriage test the final straw?" (May 2009)

Doesn't appear so.

"Ange - Life without Brad" (June 2009)

Except she was still with Brad.

"Gwyneth marriage under attack" (November 2009)

Seemed to withstand whatever "attack" that was.

"Lady Gaga - battling serious illness?" (June 2010)

Seems to be bearing up.

"Has Kate secretly got married?" (October 2010)

No, she waited a year and then got very publicly married.

The secret of pitching is making them say no

So you want to get on in the media, do you, kids? Well here's my advice to you, refreshed by a recent experience.

When pitching projects to large, bureaucratic organisations, try to get them to say no. Get them to say that is an idea their organisation has no interest in now or in the foreseeable future. Get them to make you promise never to speak of it again.

You probably think it's hard to get them to say yes. That's certainly the case but it's not half as difficult as it is to get them to say no. Very few executives have the nerve to say no without first seeking the backing of their fellow execs. They're terrified they will say no to something that will prove to be a success elsewhere. Thus what they do is endlessly procrastinate in the hope that you'll lose interest or they'll get moved to some other post.

Next time you pitch something tell them they have a week to make up their mind and then you take it somewhere else. You may not get a successful outcome but at least you'll waste less time.

Keep going like this and you won't have newspapers to kick around anymore

When we were entering the 6th form they did everything they could to encourage us to read a newspaper. We were of course nudged to "take" The Guardian or The Times or the Telegraph. I think they probably knew that our parents were happy with the Yorkshire Post, which had a world view that didn't stretch much to Lancashire, let alone overseas. That was in the 60s. I started buying a paper then and carried on through the 70s, 80s and 90s to today.

I don't recall much discussion about which paper anyone read. When pressed people would repeat variants on the line that was put in the mouth of Jim Hacker in "Yes Minister", but more in amusement than in the present mood of indignation:

"I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

I've never known a time when people argued so bitterly about the values of different newspapers. The weird thing is that most of the people doing the arguing don't buy newspapers any more. They consult them, certainly, they scan their headlines, tweet about them and they happily link to them but they don't actually read them - not like a buyer would read them. Many of them say they won't even pay to read the news on iPad or on a Kindle version such as The Guardian has launched today. Ultimately the coming generation's unwillingness to pay is going to decide the future of newspapers more certainly than any scandals or PCC deliberations.

In the days when people bought papers they would direct at least a fiver a week towards their title of choice. You've got to sell a lot of click-through advertising and sponsorship to make up that shortfall. That's what Murdoch's corporate investors (your pension funds if you have one) have been telling him for years. This current mess only increases their determination to get out of papers altogether. Nobody's buying them, they say, and the advertisers have lots of other places to go. It's difficult to argue with that line. When the investors take flight from newspapers it will ultimately threaten the papers Twitter Nation approves of and doesn't buy just as surely as the ones it hates and doesn't buy.

Never seen this in a magazine before

At the Printout! event I spoke at on Wednesday, Les Jones gave me a copy of his magazine, Elsie.

Inside the centre spread I found this.

When I opened it, this was inside.

Kewl, as I believe the youngsters say.

No more holidays for Matt Wells

Interesting that in the midst of the biggest media story of the last few years the Guardian's excellent Media Talk podcast seems to have been caught on the hop. Its estimable anchor Matt Wells tweeted yesterday from his holiday in Turkey that since the producer was also away Media Talk would be unlikely to appear this week. Since then somebody has drafted in a relief anchor and they promise to publish a Media Talk podcast about the News of The World later today, though not before the BBC's equally excellent Media Show with its no less estimable Steve Hewlett had rejigged their schedules to get there first.

This may be the last time this happens. Obviously the actual newspapers keep coming out even when people go on holiday but the "digital stuff" can sometimes go by the board for a week or two, even in the best organised places. The odd user may miss a podcast but since they're not paying for them then nobody feels too bad about them going without for a while. It's only when something like this happens that a media organisation realises that the one thing people value more than anything else is not pictures, learned think pieces or even more reporting. What they want is just people who know what they're talking about talking about it. And maybe the only way of making sure podcasts are always available is to pay for them.

How to tell if you're old enough for The New Yorker

Last night I was one of the speakers at Printout!, an event put together by Magculture and Stack. It was held, not in a conference centre, but in a cellar bar near Old Street. The people there saw themselves as "making" magazines rather than publishing them. Raygun occupied the same place in their world as NME once occupied in mine.

We were asked to choose one favourite magazine and, in five minutes, explain why. I chose The New Yorker. There's always a conscious and a sub-conscious reason for liking a magazine. My conscious reason for liking the New Yorker is for its range of compelling stories. My sub-conscious reason is to do with getting older.

For most of your life the world is a frustrating place because it appears to be run by people older than you are. Then one morning you wake up and find that it's a frustrating place because it's run by people younger than you are. When you reach this stage The New Yorker suddenly has a really strong pull on you. Suddenly it functions as a counter-balance to what seems like the increasing hysteria of everyday life.